Mapping My Life Through a Changing Tel Aviv

Growing up in 1950s and ‘60s in Jaffa, my friends and I liked to visit nearby central Tel Aviv on weekends to stroll along Dizengoff Street, then the Israeli city’s major artery. The No. 7 bus went from Jaffa through the dilapidated neighborhoods of southern Tel Aviv and into Dizengoff Square, where the whole city went on Saturday nights to see and to be seen; its route served as the spine of our mental map of the city. Whenever we needed to get someplace in Tel Aviv, we went to Dizengoff and found our way from there.

Such a navigational approach will probably sound familiar to urban travelers of my pre-smartphone generation: We relied on landmarks to envision the urban layout. When I moved to Tel Aviv proper in the 1970s to become a city planner, the bus that drove from my home to my office downtown was again the No. 7. Every time I used it, it reminded me of my childhood trips. But in the intervening years, its route had changed. And that helped expand my mental map to encompass new neighborhoods and landmarks.